I have often paid the price of sleeplessness for my father’s crimes, the crimes of all of Germany, though I had never set foot in that country when I again encountered the idea that became so compelling to me in the summer of my thirteenth year.

Women’s writing is so often ghettoized and hidden from view. Women write from the private, individual “I,” while men write of the public and the universal “we.” In her newest collection, Invocation to Daughters, Filipino American poet Barbara Jane Reyes boldly and loudly refuses that division.

The best piece of writing I’ve ever read about The Catcher in the Rye is Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Salinger and Sobs.” The essay is about D’Ambrosio’s brother’s death by suicide and about the underlying threat of suicide that runs through so many of Salinger’s stories.

Nature offers the comforting suggestion of continuity, an awareness of scale; it can be both menacing and welcoming; it’s fertile ground for symbol and simile. However, in times of heightened political tension, poems about trees can feel like a cop-out, or especially irrelevant.

Studies consistently show that women read more than men, and that the publishing industry is dominated by (white) women. So why, then, are male writers still reviewed in prestigious publications at far higher rates than women?

Not all representations of museums overtly highlight the way they structurally rely on certain power dynamics, and yet the adherence to a certain normalizing discourse is always there, lurking, even when the explicit intention of the museum is to reconnect with a lost past.

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision ruling that immigrants, documented or not, can be detained indefinitely without right to a bond hearing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we produce and consume narratives about class and race in contemporary American literature.